Thursday, December 22, 2005

Stupidity Tax

Has anyone else noticed how stupid people tend to cost the most to the taxpayer? The people who recklessly abuse their bodies... the people who drink far too much and ratch up public health bills... numerous other instances. Hardly fair. Balance things out again by having stupid people pay an additional 10c in the dollar in tax, or otherwise proportional to their stupidity. The definition of "stupid" will be decided by a test, taken every 5 years by everyone in the population.

Or otherwise, education is the answer. It doesn't matter if you've got the best tax system in the world if everybody is thick. If some people are poor because they spend all their money on booze and alcohol, it doesn't matter what your fiscal policy is. If most people don't have a basic understanding of economics, how are they going to make economically sound decisions, employing such basic methods such as opportunity cost? Or if everyone make fallacious decisions because they don't know better.

If we're going to have a knowledge economy, we're going to have to teach people to think.

That's something to introduce into schools. Some course, "Behaviour Studies" or something. We teach them the basics of staying alive, but not the crucial next step. Such a course would contain crucial bits of economics and psychology, without going further than is necessary for the lowest common denominator. There's plenty of crap we can jettison to make room for it.